The Role of Politeness in Negotiations
By Alice Lee, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior
A question that frequently plagues dealmakers is how to begin the bargaining process—Should I go first? What should I ask for? And how should I say it? A large literature speaks to whether to make the opening move, and what to ask for (i.e., how extreme to be). However, surprisingly little research has examined the latter—how to say it. Is this concern about how best to phrase an offer misplaced or deserving of serious consideration? Might the phrasing determine how well one does, or even if one gets the opportunity to bargain at all? In recent work, my collaborators and I examine an aspect of this question—whether a negotiator’s success depends on the politeness with which they express their offer.
In a paper published in Research in Organizational Behavior (Lee, Mason, & Malcomb, 2022), we advance the perspective that the inclination to use polite speech in everyday social interaction applies to deal-making settings. Politeness is a set of verbal behaviors intended to validate and defer to interaction partners (e.g., “Any chance you can lower the price?” vs. “Lower the price”).
Building off and integrating existing literature on the pragmatics of influence and compliance with negotiation scholarship, we offer testable propositions regarding how attempts at polite speech manifest in negotiations, who is especially likely to express them, under what conditions, and to what effect. We also consider the conditions under which this communication strategy undermines negotiators. Overall, we posit that strategically adjusting one’s utterances to signal deference and respect (i.e., incorporating politeness) allows negotiators to make ambitious requests without derailing the exchange.
Building on this work, in a working paper, we demonstrate in six studies featuring a variety of negotiation contexts (sale of a service, sale of a good, hiring decisions, etc.), with both buyers and sellers in the offer-maker role, and using both hypothetical scenarios and a live dyadic exchange, that assertive offers made with linguistic hedges (e.g., I was hoping you would consider a sale price of $50) translate into better outcomes on average than directly-stated offers without these devices (e.g., I want a sale price of $50). This result is driven by two dynamics: 1) negotiators who stated their offers with direct language were significantly more likely to end up in an impasse (and were thus left with their no-deal alternative), and 2) direct-speaking negotiators who did manage to reach a deal did not get more attractive settlement terms than speakers who instead hedged their offer.
Our findings suggest that politeness plays a significant role in negotiations, and provide prescriptive guidance about how to balance the benefits of being assertive (you “anchor” a partner on a self-favorable outcome) against the risks (e.g., you derail the exchange).
Alice Lee is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at the ILR School.
Professor Lee examines key features of social influence, where one person makes an overture toward another in the hopes of achieving a particular economic or subjective outcome.